ABSTRACT
The aristocratic, entrepreneurial and working-class ideals, then, were the three major class ideals contending for supremacy in early nineteenth-century England. Yet there was another class and another ideal, without analysing which it is still not possible to understand the struggle between them. An extraordinary proportion of the spokesmen of the first three ideals were members of none of the three classes: James Mill, Henry Brougham, and Nassau Senior, for example, of the entrepreneurial ideal; Charles Hall, Thomas Hodgskin, John Gray, and Bronterre O’Brien, of the working-class ideal; T.R. Malthus, John Wilson (editor of Blackwood’s), Coleridge and Southey, of the aristocratic ideal.4 To what class did this collection of lawyers, doctors, public officials, journalists, professors and lecturers belong? To the middle class, certainly, but not to the capitalist middle class. They belonged to the non-capitalist or professional middle class, a class curiously neglected in the social theories of the age, but one which played a part out of all proportion to its numbers in both the theory and the practice of class conflict.
